Wayne Wu

wayne_wu.jpg

I am a Postdoc at Vision and Autonomy Intelligence Lab (VAIL) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), working with Bolei Zhou. I also have the pleasure of collaborating with Trevor Darrell (UC Berkeley EECS) and Jiaqi Ma (UCLA CEE). Previously, I served as a Research Scientist at Shanghai AI Lab, where I led the Virtual Human Group, working with Dahua Lin. I was a Visiting PhD at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), working with Chen Change Loy. In June 2022, I obtained my PhD in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University.

"I build world simulators and models for physical AI; I put people first, always."

Research

My research lies at the intersection of computer vision, robotics, and computer graphics. My goal is to develop human-centric physical AI systems capable of perceiving, understanding, and interacting with the human-populated open world. In the long term, my vision is to build intelligent urban mobility and service systems that help people in everyday city life, transforming cities to be more sustainable, safe, and accessible. To advance this vision, I address key challenges in the scalability of robot learning environments, the situational awareness of agents, and the realism of populated virtual humans, through three directions:

  • Scalable World Simulators: Developing large-scale robot learning platforms with diverse assets and infinite urban scenes, and enabling high-efficiency robot training, as in UrbanVerse, URBAN-SIM, MetaUrban, Vid2Sim, and OmniObject3D.
  • Situational Behavior Modeling: Building autonomous decision-making models of humans and other agents, to behave robustly based on multimodal understanding of surroundings -- including vision, audio, and language, as in Seeing-to-Experiencing, PedGen, and EmbodiedHuman.
  • Realistic Virtual Humans: Constructing high-fidelity 4D volumetric capture systems and datasets, as in DNA-Rendering and RenderMe-360; and developing human foundation models to obtain generalizable representations, as in CosmicMan and MotionBert.

Recent Talks and Lectures

Jan, 2026 I will give a talk at Yale.
Nov, 2025 Invited talk, “Scaling Physical AI via Reality World Simulators”, @ UIUC, hosted by Shenlong Wang.
Nov, 2025 Invited talk, “Scaling Physical AI via Reality World Simulators”, @ NYU, hosted by Chen Feng.
Nov, 2025 Invited talk, “Scaling Physical AI via Reality World Simulators”, @ Princeton, hosted by Jia Deng.
Nov, 2025 Guest lecture, “Scaling Physical AI via Reality World Simulators”, @ LSU, hosted by Dong Lao.
Nov, 2025 Invited talk, “Scaling Physical AI via Reality World Simulators”, @ JHU, hosted by Tianmin Shu and Alan Yuille.
Oct, 2025 Tutorial, “Scaling Physical AI via Structured World Simulators”, @ DriveX Tutorial @ ICCV 2025.
Oct, 2025 Guest lecture, “Building Scalable, Human-Centric Physical AI Systems”, @ Upenn, hosted by Lingjie Liu.
Jul, 2025 Invited talk, “Building Scalable Physical AI Systems”, @ SVL Lab in Stanford, hosted by Jiajun Wu.
Jul, 2025 Invited talk, “Building Scalable Physical AI Systems”, @ Roblox, hosted by David Durst.
Jun, 2025 Invited talk, “Scaling-up Urban Simulation for Autonomous Micro-mobility”, @ Real-to-Sim Workshop @ CVPR 2025.
Feb, 2025 Invited talk, “Scaling-up Urban Simulation for Autonomous Micro-mobility”, @ BAIR Lab in UC Berkeley, hosted by Trevor Darrell and Angjoo Kanazawa.
Jun, 2024 Invited talk, “Simulation Platforms for Embodied AI in Urban Spaces”, @ POETS Workshop @ CVPR 2024.

News

Oct, 2025 I am honored with the UCLA Chancellor’s Award 2025, as the only awardee in School of Engineering. 🏆
Oct, 2025 I will serve as Area Chair at CVPR 2026.
May, 2025 We are organizing the workshop on Real-to-Sim: Bridging the Gap between Neural Rendering and Robot Learning at CVPR 2025. 🔥
May, 2025 We are organizing the workshop on Embodied “Humans”: Symbiotic Intelligence Between Virtual Humans and Humanoid Robots at CVPR 2025. 🔥
Jan, 2025 We released MetaUrban – a simulation platform for Embodied AI in urban spaces. Try it now!
Mar, 2024 We are organizing the workshop on Virtual Humans for Robotics and Autonomous Driving at CVPR 2024.
Jun, 2023 OmniObject3D is selected as Best Paper Candidate at CVPR 2023. 🏆
Oct, 2022 I am leading OpenXDLab – a new large-scale open-source data platform!
Aug, 2020 We are organizing Workshop on Sensing, Understanding and Synthesizing Humans, ECCV 2020.
Jul, 2020 We released MMAction2 – OpenMMLab’s Next Generation Action Understanding Toolbox.
Jul, 2020 We released MMEditing – OpenMMLab’s Image and Video Editing Toolbox.

Selected Publications

  1. UrbanVerse: Scaling Urban Simulation by Watching City-Tour Videos
    Mingxuan Liu*, Honglin He*, Elisa Ricci,  Wayne Wu, and Bolei Zhou
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
    arXiv Project Page
  2. From Seeing to Experiencing: Scaling Navigation Foundation Models with Reinforcement Learning
    Honglin He, Yukai Ma,  Wayne Wu, and Bolei Zhou
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
    arXiv Project Page
  3. Learning Sidewalk Autopilot from Multi-Scale Imitation with Corrective Behavior Expansion
    Honglin He, Yukai Ma, Brad Squicciarini,  Wayne Wu, and Bolei Zhou
    International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026
  4. Towards Autonomous Micromobility through Scalable Urban Simulation
    Wayne Wu *, Honglin He*, Chaoyuan Zhang, Jack He, Seth Z. Zhao, Ran Gong, Quanyi Li, and Bolei Zhou
    Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025
    arXiv Project Page
    Highlight
  5. Vid2Sim: Realistic and Interactive Simulation from Video for Urban Navigation
    Ziyang Xie, Zhizheng Liu, Zhenghao Peng,  Wayne Wu, and Bolei Zhou
    Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025
    arXiv Project Page
  6. MetaUrban: An Embodied AI Simulation Platform for Urban Micromobility
    Wayne Wu *, Honglin He*, Jack He, Yiran Wang, Chenda Duan, Zhizheng Liu, Quanyi Li, and Bolei Zhou
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
    arXiv YouTube Project Page
    Spotlight
  7. CosmicMan: A Text-to-Image Foundation Model for Humans
    Shikai Li, Jianglin Fu, Kaiyuan Liu, Wentao Wang, Kwan-Yee Lin, and Wayne Wu †
    Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024
    arXiv YouTube Project Page
    Highlight
  8. RenderMe-360: A Large Digital Asset Library and Benchmarks Towards High-fidelity Head Avatars
    Contributors to RenderMe-360
    Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Datasets and Benchmarks, 2023
    arXiv YouTube Project Page
  9. DNA-Rendering: A Diverse Neural Actor Repository for High-Fidelity Human-centric Rendering
    Contributors to DNA-Rendering
    International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023
    arXiv YouTube Project Page
  10. SynBody: Synthetic Dataset with Layered Human Models for 3D Human Perception and Modeling
    Zhitao Yang, Zhongang Cai, Haiyi Mei, Shuai Liu, Zhaoxi Chen, Weiye Xiao, Yukun Wei, Zhongfei Qing, Chen Wei, Bo Dai,  Wayne Wu, Chen Qian, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu, and Lei Yang
    International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023
    arXiv YouTube Project Page
  11. OmniObject3D: Large-Vocabulary 3D Object Dataset for Realistic Perception, Reconstruction and Generation
    Tong Wu, Jiarui Zhang, Xiao Fu, Yuxin Wang, Jiawei Ren, Liang Pan,  Wayne Wu, Lei Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Chen Qian, Dahua Lin, and Ziwei Liu
    Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023
    arXiv Project Page
    Best Paper Candidate
  12. Look at Boundary: A Boundary-Aware Face Alignment Algorithm
    Wayne Wu, Chen Qian, Shuo Yang, Quan Wang, Yici Cai, and Qiang Zhou
    Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018
    arXiv YouTube Project Page